Hey everybody, before we begin the show today, I want to let you know that I'm going to be having a live show on Sunday, February 12th at the White Hotel in Leamsburg, Brooklyn.

You don't need to buy tickets to show up. It's part of an arts festival called Work by Work.

And I'm going to be doing my presentation from four to five o'clock in the salon area, which is in the back of the lobby.

In fact, there's going to be podcasts from other networks that night doing different shows, so it's going to be fun.

All right, here's the show.

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, American Malinsky.

Now when I started this podcast, I always wanted to get to the point where I could bring on other voices who could tell stories that I can't, because I'm always going to be stuck in my perspective, either as a middle-aged white man, or just in terms of what I like,

and what speaks to me. And I'm often reminded of that when I talk with my wife, Serena, who's Chinese American.

And I would talk about as a kid how I could easily imagine myself as all these different characters from Star Wars to Ghostbusters,

and she would tell me how she was so starved for any kind of media representation.

But she used to watch reruns of this cringeworthy cartoon from the early 60s called Hashimoto Mouse.

Hashimoto! Hashimoto!

Excuse bad manners, please. Is that from Imperial Palace?

So I was really interested when Sam Caden-Lye contacted me on Facebook.

He told me about what the series Avatar the Last Airbender meant for him.

And some of what Sam told me about Avatar the Last Airbender, and his reactions to it touched on similar issues that I explored in my episode about Ghost in the Shell,

but a lot of his insights really surprised me.

So I invited Sam on the show to help steer this episode.

So Sam, welcome.

Hey, what's up Eric?

Okay, so you're actually not here in Brooklyn. You're in Ireland. What, you're in college there?

I actually just graduated really, really recently, but I studied creative process, which is, you know, kind of useless,

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